David Smith is a broadcast engineer employed full time by
Kentucky Educational Television, the State of Kentucky's network of
non-commercial television stations. In his spare time, he maintains
radio stations. He can be reached by email at
smith2855@bellsouth.net.

I was recently involved with putting two new radio stations on the
air. From the transmission system to the studio wiring, we did two
completely new installations. Among all the different pieces of
equipment that we bought and installed, I was most impressed with
the latest version of the Tie Line CODEC, iMix G3.

The two new radio stations are not co-located and, in fact, are
about 45 miles apart. Each covers a different geographic area and
each represents a start-up operation. They are both are operated by
Lincoln Garrard Broadcasting Company, Inc., which is a company that
has been owned by members of my family since the early
1960's.

WPBK-FM is licensed to Crab Orchard, Kentucky and has studios in
Stanford, Kentucky and WKFC-FM is licensed to North Corbin,
Kentucky with studios in London, Kentucky.
The company built the stations with a plan to provide good, old
fashioned radio coverage of local events, including local sports
coverage. The sports coverage involves in excess of 80 live events
per station, per year. Half of those events are away from the home
team facilities and are in a variety of locations.

After much research, we determined that the best equipment to
use to accomplish the desired coverage with the quality and
flexibility that we needed was the Tie Line i-Mix G3, which we
acquired from John Lynch at Broadcast Supply Worldwide (BSW). We
bought two i-Mix G3 units and two Commander Studio units.
Installation was very easy and the units worked right out of the
box. We equipped the i-Mix G3 units with Verizon Wireless EVDO
capability (wireless broadband service), which allows use of 3G
technology to connect to the studio via the internet.

Our company has always had good talent for our local sports
coverage but many of our "away" games were covered by cell phones
due to the lack of courtesy lines and the prohibitive costs of POTS
installation for a single game. The cell phone audio was never up
to the standard of quality that we thought was important. The i-Mix
G3 uses CODEC technology with a variety of delivery methods: POTS
dial-up phone line, 3G wireless internet or wired internet. The
audio quality from the i-Mix G3 is studio grade and the
connectivity is reliable and easy.

Our first on-air test was the opening basketball game of the
season on WKFC. The quality was amazing, especially when compared
to the competition's poor signal-quality VHF Remote Pick Up. The
winners that night were the local basketball team and the new
station in town, WKFC!! Since that time, our i-Mix G3 units have
traversed the state of Kentucky and even originated games from
Florida. Combined totals for the month of December, 2008, show that
these two new stations originated 48 basketball games from eighteen
different venues.

This equipment is easy plug-n-play technology but in order for
the i-Mix 3G to "find" the Commander studio unit, a static IP
address is needed for the Commander. In order to get a static IP,
one must usually pay for a higher level of DSL or comparable
service. In our case, it took more than a week to have the static
IP provisioned for WKFC. We already had static IP addresses at WPBK
due to having some other equipment that required their use.

As luck would have it, we needed to use the 3G capability to
originate a game in Louisville and send it back to WKFC in London
but we didn't have the necessary static IP at WKFC. After looking
at each station's sports schedules, we realized that the Saturday
game on WKFC would be during a time that we were not covering any
games on WPBK.

To make a long story short, we used WKFC's i-Mix G3 to connect
to the Commander studio unit at WPBK and then looped the signal
through WPBK's i-Mix G3 on a POTS line forty five miles away to the
WKFC studio unit. The audio quality was great and the "repeater" at
WPBK was transparent, allowing two way communication between our
studio at WKFC and the announcers in Louisville.

Thinking that I had just accomplished an unrivaled engineering
feat, I told Kevin Webb at Tie Line in Indianapolis about this
set-up. He informed me that the WPBK Commander studio unit could
have done the same thing without involving another i-Mix G3 by
making a dual connection between the WKFC studio unit on a dial-up
POTS and the WKFC i-Mix G3 on the internet connection. Moreover,
Bill Miller at Tie Line sent me step-by-step directions for
accomplishing this trick.

Although, it was a classic example on my part of re-inventing
the wheel, albeit a wooden one, when the technology was available
for a nice aluminum alloy one, we accomplished our remote broadcast
from Louisville to London, Kentucky, with an unattended repeater in
Stanford, Kentucky, and some ingenuity. While we now have the
necessary static IP addresses at WKFC, one should keep this set-up
in mind for the rare occasion where the studio internet service may
be down and connection by 3G is necessary or when a simulcast of
the remote audio is needed at two stations. Tie Line refers to this
as "How to set up two discrete bi-directional channels in Dual Mono
Mode."

Our biggest test to date of the 3G technology came when WPBK
covered six games in a Holiday basketball tournament in Florida
this past December. Our sports announcers made the 800 mile trip to
Florida after being told several times by tournament organizers
that a courtesy phone line would be available for them to use. Once
there, they found out that the games were being played in a brand
new gymnasium that had yet to be wired for telephones. It was
either 3G or our less-than-acceptable cell phone quality.

The 3G connected right up to our studio unit and other than
losing power when a power-strip was unplugged, we had no real
issues with using the 3G service for six ballgames over a four day
period. Note: Tie Line does offer a battery pack for the i-Mix G3.
The audio quality was excellent, even at a lower bit rate, which we
used to ensure more reliable connectivity. In fact, one of the fans
from the Kentucky team we were covering, was called on his cell
phone in Florida during a game by someone listening back home and
asked him if he had just yelled something out because they had
recognized his voice on the radio. That person told him that the
WPBK quality from Florida was so good that it was like being at the
game.

With all the different modes of connecting the i-Mix G3 to our
studio, this is the only piece of equipment that we have to carry.
It is functional, flexible and of the highest quality. By the way,
we pack the i-Mix G3 in a plastic carrying case, filled with
egg-shell foam that is sold for the purpose of carrying four
handguns that we bought at a local mega-retailer for under twenty
dollars.